Photos - The Writer's Workshop

About who has not pleasure in a good novel

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
Writing a novel is a terrible experience

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O’Connor
Literature is nothing but carpentry.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“With luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.”

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway
The forms of things unknown and the the poet’s pen

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a nam
William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

© 2018 The Writer's Workshop | Privacy

The Writer's Workshop, an on-campus and online program offering writing classes in Seattle, online and travel writing classes.